This report was shown to Professor Charles W Sydnor of Hampton-Sydney College, Virginia (United States) in 1976 by a person from Richmond (Virginia) who had discovered it after the second world war. This man, apparently Eric M Lippmann according to the signature, was at the time employed by the US Army on collecting documents and seeking anything that might be used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. He seems to remember finding carbon copy of the original report among a set of documents in a place he cannot recall exactly, somewhere in Bavaria. The original was not there. Having immediately realized the value of this report, which described the whole process of exterminating the Jews in Auschwitz, he made a typed copy for himself, as he had to hand the carbon over to the American Prosecutor at Nuremberg He certified in longhand that he had made a true copy, and signed it “Eric M Lipmann”. The two sheets that he typed are now preserved in the Tauber Estate of Brandeis University with other documents from the Third Reich.

[The author would like to stress that in 1945 47 it was not so easy to reproduce documents as is today. Finding the original of a document, whose content is perfectly well known, requires long and laborious research with frequently uncertain results. Political interference can lead to utter confusion in this type of investigation, as has been shown by the recent case of a highly-placed person in placed person in Austria.]

THE FRANCKE-GRIKSCH REPORT

Document 58/I

Document 58/II

[Photocopy of the typed copy of the carbon copy in SS Major Francke-Griksch's career file, kindly transmitted to Serge Klarsfeld by Charles W Sydnor, Jr.]